Picking up the camera

Anna: The following photos were taken by Philippe. He hasn't been taking photos very often lately, so he was looking for a reason to pick up the camera. :-D



This photo was an accident, really. He forgot to turn on the off shoe flash, so it ended up being a long exposure. With no tripod and shakey hands.

The end result turned out to be far more interesting than the clear photos taken afterwards. This photo is completely unadjusted, except for resizing.



Here we have a fuzzy looking baby snail. I cropped it rather tightly, mostly because it happened to be crawling over a piece of ... er... pleco poo. Taken using the macro lens and the off shoe flash. The snail is less than 1/4 of an inch long.

I have no idea what the orange bits are. We can't actually see them normally. Amazing what can be seen when using a macro lens.

At most, we've counted 18 baby snails, though there's no guarentee that there still is that many. They finally started hatching from one of the egg clusters on the underside of the lid, after I happened to move the light to a different position. I guess the extra warmth did it. The egg cluster than was being laid in this photo, however, fell into the water some time yesterday evening. I have no idea how long it was in the water before I spotted it, and decided against trying to fish it out of our really deep tank. It's still bobbing around on the bottom. At the moment, there are still 3 egg clusters in place. The very first one laid is as unchanged as ever. The second one, I can barely see way in the back, under where the filter is hung. It may have actually had some eggs hatched, but I can't see it well enough to say for sure. There's one left on the underside of the lid, and a few of those have hatched, though not all survived. I can still see some that hatched but never dropped into the water, dangling from the bottom of the cluster.

The babies are in a wide range of sizes, and one's grown amazingly quickly. They seem to hide in the gravel a lot, but they also like to go into the fake rock cavern and inside the skull we've got, so I doubt we ever see all of them at once. We'll see how many survive to get big enough to give away.

Our tank sure is clean, though.